MORNING BUZZ: Visits, Ties and Support

MORNING BUZZ: Visits, Ties and Support

Good Morning!

I hope you are having a great Friday. Get the jackets out cause it’s going to feel like Fall by this time tomorrow morning. By that time thousands of Iowans will be tailgating outside Kinnick Stadium for the Cy-Hawk showdown. I won’t reveal loyalty in this match-up…mostly cause I don’t have one. I want to see a good game. If any of you took my tie as a sign of loyalty to the Hawks. Think again. My Missouri Tigers enter SEC play this weekend against Megan Salois’ #7 Georgia Bulldogs.

Visits

I thought the President’s Speech was solid last night with some good lines for sure…the Argument he’s making is that Republican strategies of the last 30 years (tax cuts) haven’t worked. He is pairing that with the argument that he needs more time to fix the Economic mess he inherited. He just connects better with his audience… Now, that’s not a qualification for President of the United States…but in an election it might be what helps make a voter’s mind up. Coming out of the Convention Chuck Todd said it best on NBC last night. Republicans missed an opportunity and have a lot of ground to make up.

While I believe the economy was much worse for The President the day he took office, than it was when he was running for election the first time…I also think this argument will fall flat to a lot of voters. It appears the President and Congress had a big opportunity to make major strides in reducing the deficit and ensuring the future of some of the entitlement programs. Bob Woodward has a new book coming out next week. In it he details the negotiations between the President and Speaker Jon Boehner that almost produced that historic agreement. Woodward’s reporting is always solid, so his assessment that The President showed a lack of Leadership making the deal work is something to think about.

Dueling visits to Iowa today show again how this election is going to come down to a handful of states…and within those states a handful of counties…

Support

I also wanted to clarify. I wrote the other day about a commercial Rep Leonard Boswell’s campaign put out attacking Rep. Tom Latham. I said I was disappointed that the debate between the two was going to degrade into mud-slinging half-truths. I stand by that. I want to make sure I’m clear. It wasn’t an endorsement of Latham…in fact, I’d ding his campaign for the same thing if they start throwing up these kinds of ads. Maybe my frustration isn’t so much at the campaigns but at my fellow voters. If these ads or speeches laced with half-truths and easy to digest hyperbole didn’t work…campaigns wouldn’t produce them.

So it’s on us…the voters. We shouldn’t accept the ads or the speeches at face value. We should look more closely at the issues. Maybe if we did, the kind of compromise the President and Speaker ALMOST had would be more common. An obdurate adherence to a political viewpoint isn’t principle. Most of what we debate in politics is opinion, not truth. A little bit of each party’s recipe for success in the country would probably produce the right result. Even in my lifetime…Reagan’s compromise with a Democrat Congress and Clinton’s Compromise with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America Congress produced what we now know to be recession busting government policy..

It won’t work until we start thinking for ourselves a little bit instead of being detoured down the latest rabbit hole politicians put in our path. I hope we send a few more free thinkers back to Congress instead of the snake-oil salesmen comfortable with feeding voters half-truths in the hope our collective apathy will lead us to simply accept their version of events.